What happened?

OCTOBER is almost over and November is only two days away. What happened?

Changing Perspectives

Rutendo Gwatidzo

Time flies just like that, and before you realise it, a week, a month or a year is gone.

We cannot even begin to talk about a day because, as it begins, it suddenly ends.

It feels like yesterday when the year started, but we are already nearing its end.

I would like to pose the following question to you: What have you achieved over the past 10 months of the year?

I believe life is not easy and was never meant to be; you have to fight for what you believe.

The fighting is where a significant number of us get screened.

Fighting is the bridge that separates success and failure.

However, it is not a matter of fighting in any way. There is need to fight using winning strategies.

There are different winning strategies and they depend on one’s goal and the season.

Strategies that work for one may not apply to the next person.

The most important thing is to understand the season of life you are in, then adapt and adjust accordingly.

I grew up in Dande Valley, where we lived alongside wild animals for many years.

When my parents moved there, they lived in a new residential area close to forests, hence we were surrounded by many kinds of animals.

Living that close to the jungle was a matter of life and death.

We had to learn how to coexist with wildlife.

For instance, the strategies that worked when dealing with elephants were different from those used in the case of buffalos, hyenas, baboons or jackals.

For example, to scare away elephants, flames from a fire would work. However, the same flames would cause a hippo to charge towards you.

In other words, we had to learn new skills now and then.

Surviving in the jungle required us to be deliberate and alert all the time.

Yes, winning strategies were required, but we had to be intentional when applying them.

I believe in this day and world, we need to be highly alert and deliberate to make it in life.

Organisational status

The last quarter of the year is the season when many companies engage in strategic planning for the upcoming year.

Many companies also do quarterly or even monthly strategic plans.

A good number of managers and teams have strategies written all over in their offices and diaries.

What lacks is the intention to implement those strategies and the alertness to know when to execute a different plan.

What works when a business is starting is different from what works when an enterprise has existed for some time.

The challenge with many teams is that once they find a strategy that seems to work, they run with it until it fails to produce results, even to the extent of costing the business.

This past week, I came across some managers who were wondering what happened to their business.

Their concerns were that, the business started collapsing after a significant number of years, yet they were using the same strategies that worked before.

I then remembered the skills I learnt while growing up close to the jungle.

I also remembered the same skills I learnt in my businesses.

When you find a good strategy, it does not mean it will remain useful in perpetuity.

There are many other factors to consider.

What makes a winning strategy is the ability to apply it against all other factors and still achieve the desired results.

For example, when we moved to Dande, the animals were not very harmful because people had not yet become much of a threat to them.

As time passed by, the same animals became more violent and harmful.

The explanation is simple. As the number of people increased in the area, they began to destroy trees and kill the animals.

The same applies to business. As the number of competitors increases and as customers become long-term, expectations change and strategies should be altered as well.

The same old good strategy may become redundant and failure to adjust may lead to collapse of the business.

I would like to encourage team members and managers to be creative and innovative enough to review their strategies every week.

The same good strategy may simply need another dimension to be added to it.

General facts

Be inspired to constantly review your strategies so that they do not become redundant.

This applies to every aspect of life.

You would not want to wonder what happened.

The same way time flies is probably the same way strategies become redundant without us realising it if we are not
alert.

What happened is a common refrain we use almost every week, month and year.

As the week comes to an end, many tend to wonder what happened.

The same applies when a month or a year is gone.

I challenge you to change the narrative by wondering what happened because you would have met your targets ahead of time, instead of falling behind.

Be encouraged to be known for a positive “what happened”, instead of a negative one.

The time to begin to change the narrative is now.

Great things can still happen in the remaining two months of the year.

All the best.

Rutendo Gwatidzo is managing consultant at The HUB HR Consultancy. She is a multi-award-winning consultant, speaker and mentor. She is also author of the books “Born to Fight” and “Breaking the Silence”. Contacts: +263 714 575 805/ [email protected]/ Facebook: Rutendo Gwatidzo_Official